of the plane’s engine as it passed overhead. And all the while, the train raced on, faster, faster, until we were plunged into the sudden blackness of a tunnel. The brakes went on, hard, so shrill and loud that it hurt my ears. We found ourselves thrown violently together, squeezed half up against the seat, and half underneath it. The squealing of the brakes seemed to go on forever, and all the while the stranger clung on to us tight, until at long last the train came to a shuddering, hissing halt, and we were lying together there in the darkness. It felt almost as if the train and ourselves were breathing in unison, panting, both of us trying to calm down. The carriage was thick with darkness, pitch black.
“Don’t like tunnels,” I said, trying my best not to sound as frightened as I was. “How long we going to be in here, Ma?”
“Best place for us just at the moment, son,” the stranger told me. “And we’re safe enough, that’s for sure. We got a lot to thank the train driver for. He’ll stay in here long as it takes, I reckon. Don’t you worry, son.” He was helping me to my feet and sitting me down. I felt Ma’s arm come around me. She knew what I was going through. It wasn’t the German plane or the shooting that terrified me – that had been exciting. It was the dark, this thick solid wall of blackness all around me, closing in on me, enveloping me. Ma knew I couldn’t stand it, that I had to have the light on outside my bedroom door at night, as well as the lamp in the street outside. I felt a sob of fear rising in my throat and swallowed it, but it came back up again and again, like hiccups of terror that would not stop.
“It’s the dark,” Ma explained. “Barney don’t like it, never has.”
“Nor me neither,” said the stranger. And as he spoke there was a sudden flicker of light in the darkness, then an orange flame, which lit up his face and his smile, then the whole carriage. “Smoke a pipe, don’t I?” he went on, “so I always have my box of matches handy. Swan Vestas – you know, the ones with the swan on the box.” He showed me. It rattled when he shook it. “See? Good they are, last longer.” At once the panic in me subsided, and I knew it would not start again, just so long as the match lasted.
“The thing is, son,” the stranger went on, “I reckon we’re going to have to be in here for quite a while. If I was the engine driver, I’d sit tight in this tunnel till I was certain that plane – and I think maybe there was two of them, or more, who knows? – until I was quite sure they’d gone. They saw us go in here, right? So they could be waiting around up there for us to come out. Like I told you, what goes in comes out, and they know it.” His face leaned in closer to me. “Trouble is, Barney, a match don’t last forever, even a Swan Vestas match, and they last a lot longer than most. So I got to save them up a bit. I’ve got … one, two, three, four left – after this one, and this one’s going out already, isn’t it? So sooner or later, I got to blow it out, else I’ll burn my fingers. But all you got to do is to ask me to light up another one, and it’s done. Easy as pie. Only you won’t need it, will you, son? Because you know your Ma’s there and I’m here. So you’re not alone. That’s the thing about darkness, son. Makes you feel all alone. But you’re not, are you?”
“I suppose,” I said. He was looking right into my eyes. It felt as if he was breathing courage into me, through his eyes, through his smile. Then he blew out the match. We were suddenly in the dark again. I didn’t like it, but somehow it didn’t matter, not as much as I thought it would, as it had before.
“He’s a brave boy, my Barney,” said Ma. “Isn’t he?”
“He certainly is, missus,” the stranger replied. “And that’s a fact. Reckon we’d better close the window,” he said. I could hear him getting up, pulling up the window. “We don’t want the carriage full of smoke, do we? The tunnel will be full of it soon enough.”
“Trouble is, it’ll get all hot and stuffy in here,” said Ma. “But you’re right, stuffy’s a lot better than smoky.”
We must have sat there for quite some time in the darkness, none of us speaking, before the stranger spoke up. “We got to pass the time somehow,” he began. “You know what we used to do in the trenches, in the last war? Most of the time in a war, you know what you do? You sit around waiting for something to happen, hoping it won’t. It’s the waiting that was always the worst of it. We’d be hunkered down in our dugout, scared silly, waiting for the next Whizzbang to come over – beastly things they were. Or we’d be waiting for ‘stand-to’ in the early mornings. We had to be ready on ‘stand-to’, see, cos that’s when Fritz liked to attack. First light, out of the sun, out of the mist. And you know what we’d do sometimes? We’d tell each other stories – in the dark of the dugout it was often – just like it is now. We could do that now if you like. What d’you think, son?”
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